In December, the Video Cloud product team was hard at work releasing features to help our publishers increase engagement with their video content and streamline their publishing workflows. Read up on December’s release here, but don’t forget that you can always check up on the most recent release on our product updates page.

The Brightcove KK team and our partner J-Stream in Japan recently announced that Seiko Watch Corporation is leveraging Brightcove Video Cloud to support the launch of its global video portal, SEIKO TV.  SEIKO TV features a variety of video content, including Seiko Watch's different collections, recent events, major sponsorships and some of the interesting technologies behind Seiko Watches. 

Today, Brightcove and TubeMogul released the Online Video & the Media Industry Quarterly Research Report for the first and second quarters of 2011. The report examines online video discovery, usage, and engagement data from a sample of thousands of websites covering newspapers, magazines, online media, broadcasters, and brands. In addition to the quarterly data, this report takes a special look at engagement on mobile devices. 

Video is a great way to drive organic inbound traffic to your site, but for maximum impact you’ll need to find ways to distribute your content to wherever your (potential) viewers are on the web. Distributing video to your viewers increases your exposure and can provide valuable hooks back to your own website to drive traffic.

This week marked a broadcasting first in the UK with the opening match of the FA Cup shown live on Facebook.

We recently published a new case study with L'Express, one of France's highest-selling current affairs weeklies. The publication reaches more than 2.3 million readers each week through its magazine and nearly two million Internet users every month.

ComScore recently released their February 2011 US Online Video Rankings numbers, which are always an interesting measure of the state of online video.

There has been a lot of buzz recently about the importance of leveraging social networks to drive video discovery and inbound traffic. Of course, the buzz is well founded: Facebook recently became the second-largest referrer for online video streams behind Google. What’s more, viewers who discover video through social media are much more engaged, watching more video for longer periods of time. But there's another side of the social story that's equally important and doesn't get its fair share of attention - fostering engagement and discussion with in-page comments.

Back in January, we noticed that the most active search terms in Brightcove support were Facebook and YouTube.

It's #FollowFriday, so what better time to direct you to the places across the Web where Brightcove leaves its digital footprints. If you enjoy our blog, be sure to check us out whatever social network you prefer!

Today Brightcove and TubeMogul released the Online Video & the Media Industry Quarterly Research Report for the fourth quarter of 2010.

The Super Bowl is unquestionably the biggest day of the year for marketers. And this year, the event broke TV ratings records for the second year running, reaching an average audience of 111 million viewers.

Today Brightcove and TubeMogul released the Online Video & the Media Industry Quarterly Research Report for the third quarter of 2010. The report examines online video discovery, usage, and engagement data from a sample of nearly 2,000 news and entertainment websites.

In Q3, we also included a special feature focusing on the peak days of the week and times of day broken out by each of the media industries we cover. 

Notable findings include:

Discovery

• Facebook now refers more video streams than Yahoo! for the aggregate media sample. This marks the first time the social platform has surpassed the search engine and content portal. Facebook accounted for 9.6% of all referrals, making it second only to Google.
   

On Saturday, TechCrunch posted an article written by our CEO, Jeremy Allaire, on "Online Video In 2011: Connected TVs, Social Recommendations, And Standards Wars." In the article, Jeremy shares his thoughts on where online video is headed in the next year, noting that "2011 promises to be yet another year of transformation in the online video landscape." 

We're happy to announce that freenet.de GmbH, one of the largest telecommunications and Web content providers in Germany, has chosen the Brightcove online video platform to support their fast-growing video initiatives. freenet is taking advantage of the full functionality of the Brightcove platform to support video on their portal site, freenet.de, and other special interest portals, as well for its advertising partners and customers of its media unit, freeXmedia.

We are pleased to announce that Telefónica O2 Ireland, a leading provider of mobile services and communications solutions to more than 1.7 million customers in Ireland, has chosen Brightcove to support a variety of new online video initiatives.

Facebook recently became the third largest site for watching video in the United States, according to comScore data. What does that mean to video producers and marketers?

Here's a roundup of the week's news in online video, with a little perspective on the importance and implications of the for the industry at large.

Facebook Tops 500 Million Users
As the Facebook active user base reaches scale only surpassed by the world's largest populations (China and India), users continue to share more than 30 billion photographs, links, and videos per month. Because the platform delivers social and contextually relevant content amongst friends, Facebook audiences viewers are some of the internet's most engaged viewers, watching significantly longer than from other sources. 

We often talk about video's potential for keeping customers engaged on your site for longer amounts of time, but video is also a killer inbound marketing tool to be used as a point of entry to drive customers back to your site.

The purpose of inbound marketing is to get found by customers. Instead of seeking out target audiences and blasting "push" messages, inbound marketing relies on subtler "pull" tactics, drawing in customers with engaging, sticky content when it is most relevant to their needs. (Check out HubSpot resources for an in-depth definition of inbound marketing practices).

This post walks through a few of the fundamental reasons why video rocks inbound marketing.

Video Carries Engaging Content

The combination of moving images and sound remains one of the most suitable vehicles for delivering compelling content. It's up to marketers to create value-adding content that entices viewers to see what else you've got to offer as a company. Inbound marketing videos aren't your traditional 30-second advertisement spot; videos are how-to instructions, they are episodic, they expose privileged behind the scenes insights about companies and operations.  It's not the hard sell; instead inbound marketing videos are more like an amuse-bouche to pique the appetite of the customer and keep them coming back for more.

It's an exciting week for Brightcove on the mobile app news front. Yesterday we highlighted our partnership with Mobile Roadie and the highly successful Taylor Swift mobile app created by Big Machine Records.

Today Facebook rolled out the Open Graph and their new set of Social Plugins at the f8 conference in San Francisco. As you will see later on on in this post, we believe this is a massively important innovation for the Web and we’re happy to be one of the launch partners that Facebook has been working with.

Today, Internet Retailer magazine published a great article as part of its weekly E-commerce Technology Report about Brightcove customer, Kmart, and the organization's innovative use of shoppable video in Facebook.

Brightcove players offer you a choice of settings that viewers can use to share the video. Two of them are closely related and easy to confuse:

• The Get Link button presents the viewer with a direct link to the player and a button that copies the link to the clipboard, so it can be pasted into an email or instant message:

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Tonight at 8:00 pm, Canoe.ca and a host of other media organizations will broadcast a benefit show, “Together for Haiti,” to raise donations to help victims of the recent earthquake. The event will feature performances from dozens of artists who have united together to help the people of Haiti.

So we've blogged about this special relationship we have with Facebook here and here and now we have a practical real world example of the integration!

You may have noticed that sharing a Youtube link to your Facebook Wall/Newsfeed results in an embedded version of that video. Did you know you can also do this with Brightcove? All you need to do is add some metadata to your video pages and when links to those pages are shared, you videos will be embedded in Facebook, check it out below:

1.) Post Link:

I'm heading down to give my 15mins of cents to the London Facebook Garage tonight.

For those not able to make it tonight we're going to do what we did with the Drupal for Marketing event and stream this live over the BC3 platform.

We'll also have the same tie into a Facebook Livestream box and you can embed the stream directly into your FB Profile by clicking the button in-player.

You can see more about the event here : http://www.facebookgarage.co.uk/

Enjoy!

Just an FYI - for those in the London area that are keen, there is a Facebook Garage user group tomorrow night (November 11th) which I'll be presenting at.

I'm going to spend my 15 minutes of fame looking at how Facebook and Brightcove can combine to be a powerful tool in both the Push and Pull video syndication models.

I'll post my slides up here after the show but feel free to come on down and learn not about my stuff but other great presentations around developing with Facebook.

I've been reading a great post by fellow Brightcove Blogger Chris Little over at our Ecosystem blogroll about how Brightcove Players have been whitelisted by Facebook. 

This essentially means that a user can share a video from your player/site and have it appear in their FB Newsfeed for immediate inline playback.

Chris Little shows three ways to integrate your Brightcove video with Facebook, in three articles adapted from Chris's Brightcove Ecosystem blog: